@yogthos I see this more as “the more money you make, the more time you have to invest in enhancing the lives of your children instead of just struggling to keep them fed and entertained until everyone can fall asleep and start the whole miserable grind over again”

@yogthos Yet early access to computers allowed these parents to develop the skills at an early age that later led to them founding the companies that made them famous (most were already wealthy from birth)...

@yogthos I agree that corporate social media is more exploitive, psychologically, than its predecessors. Yet there were other scapegoats in the past, from MTV when it first emerged (oldsters flipped their lids over it for a long time), to television itself, to radio before that, etc. Even novels were seen as cultural degradation by some when they first emerged! I think a large part of this is many folks don’t trust things invented after they reached a certain life stage.

@meejah@yogthos That’s absolutely right! Access to computers and the internet is not the problem, it’s only when provided without the understanding of media manipulation tactics that kids are defenseless. Nevertheless, kids today are being inoculated against it far more than prior generations (it’s the oldest in society who cannot recognize the propaganda coming from Fox Media and its allies, for example).

I was trying to get at the difference between "consuming Content(tm)" (e.g. watching videos, etc) and interactively building things with the computer (e.g.programming, drawing, etc etc). Obviously, lots of grey areas in-between that are both kinds of interaction...

@yogthos Tech Billionaire Parenting: Melinda Gates' children don't have smartphones and only use a computer in the kitchen. Her husband Bill spends hours in his office reading books while everyone else is refreshing their homepage. The most sought-after private school in Silicon Valley, the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, bans electronic devices for the under-11s and teaches the children of eBay, Uber, and Google staff to make go-karts, knit, and cook. (1/2)

@yogthos Mark Zuckerburg wants his daughters to read Dr. Seuss and play outside rather than use Messenger Kids. Steve Jobs strictly limited his children's use of technology at home. It's astonishing if you think about it: the more money you make out of the tech industry, the more you appear to shield your family from its effects.

@yogthos The one problem I have with this is the implication that technology is synonymous with addictive, capitalistic, dopamine traps. It's a tool that opens up possibilities that other tools can't offer. It's like saying that compressed air is only used to get high.

I know that's not the point of this little piece, and this piece makes a lot of really *excellent* points, but it's tiring to see "technology bad" so often.

@MadestMadness yeah I don't think technology is inherently bad, it's the corporrare social media platforms that are problematic. They're designed to be addictive, and keep users on there as much as possible.

Open platforms like Mastodon don't have that problem because they don't have an incentive to monetize their users.